It's an old story you've probably heard before. Provide a free version of your software product with strict limitations on performance or other specific capabilities so that folks can give it a try without risk, while you minimize the chance of cannibalizing sales of your commercial products. Microsoft has take this strategy ...

I'm doing two new webcasts next week on Wednesday, December 19th, one in the morning and the other after lunch.
SSDs are a Game Changer for SQL Server Storage
No, session is not exclusively about SSDs. But this is my first session on IO and storage tuning that emphasizes SSDs over hard disks. As Bob Dylan said ''Times, they ...

I’m fascinated by the way people learn. I’m told there are several methods people use to understand new information, from reading to watching, from experiencing to exploring.
Personally, I use multiple methods of learning when I encounter a new topic, usually starting with reading a bit about the concepts. I quickly want to put those into ...

Speaking at a recent SQL Saturday, an attendee in one of my sessions wanted to know how they could more flexibly react to locks on their application than to wait for blocks to occur and then kill the SPID at the head of the blocking chain. They were also interested in some alternatives to using the SQL Server syntax like the ...

Here's an evergreen question. It's a question that never completely goes away. But lately, I've been getting it a few times per week. So I thought it's time to readdress the question, which usually takes some form of the following:I can't really do effective development on my little dev laptop because our production SQL Server database is 15 ...

Developing in Windows Azure is at once not that much different from what you’re familiar with in on-premises systems, and different in significant ways. Because of these differences, developers often ask about the specific process to develop and deploy a Windows Azure application - more formally called an Application Lifecycle Management, or ALM. ...

I read too much, and that, my friends, is an entirely separate topic for a blog post. But I thought I'd share with you a little more about what I'm reading because sometimes, if I'm lucky, it might be something you'd enjoy too.
So I'm going to start sharing what I'm reading at least once per week, partly so that I don't firehose too many ...

Windows and SQL Azure Resources
Cloud computing is more than just the latest buzz word in the IT trade papers. It is a remarkable paradigm shift with as much potential to ''turn over the apple cart'' of IT computing as client-server had for the world of mainframe and minicomputers. If you're not spending time to learn about cloud computing, ...

I wanted to pass along this great info from Microsoft. There are literally oodles of free resources for Visual Studio programmers. In their own words...
Take Visual Studio for a Test Drive
Take this powerful tool
and its features for a spin by downloading a full Visual Studio 2010
trial version. Discover how Visual Studio 2010 ...

Don’t be afraid of that title – I’m not talking about Six Sigma or anything super-formal here. In many organizations, there are more folks in other IT roles than in the Data Professional area. In other words, there are more developers, system administrators and so on than there are the “DBA” role.
That means we often have more to do than the ...